Or perhaps they received 46,000 complaints in a matter of days, and it took them that long to prepare their case? uce@ftc.gov doesn't receive a small amount of complaints.
But I didn't read the article either.:-)
Re:Bogus Unsubscribe addresses...
on
FTC vs Spammers
·
· Score: 1
Agreed. Most people are learning that you should never click a "remove" link for that very reason, and the time is not yet right to start telling people that it's now OK to click the "remove" link.
The best thing to do right now is to start with the worst cases, and quickly prosecute them under existing laws for fraud etc., then make it illegal to spam without "ADV:" as the first four characters of the subject line (I think California did this?) or add a header to identify spam, make the new law well-known, and start aggressively prosecuting violators. That doesn't reduce ISP bandwidth, unfortunately*, but it makes filtering much easier, and the easier it is to filter, the fewer end-users will see it, and the less profitable it will become.
This is in addition to everything else people are doing to combat spam - I use bayesian filtering myself, among other things.;-)
* I think it's RFC 822 that says once you've accepted the message envelope (just who the message is from and to, not the subject line), you have to accept the whole message. Once the message has been accepted and the bandwidth has been used, then you can discard it without delivering it to a mailbox if you want.
They'll likely compile a list of all the email addresses that were spammed to and make them available to spammers.
Oh yeah, if I were a spammer, the addresses I'd want to add to my list are people who previously complained about spam to the FTC. That'll be great for business!
(Oh, yeah, and if you make an alias, the Terminal/shell treats it as a symlink.)
No it doesn't - I just tried it, and it didn't work. This is exactly the sort of thing the parent is complaining about - yes, symlinks and aliases are different things, but although either one works in the Finder, only symlinks work from UNIX apps. UNIX apps, including tcsh and bash, do not recognize aliases and will not follow them.
I don't know if this is fixable on a system-wide basis, but I suspect it isn't. Each app would need to be updated to recognize aliases.
The only thing they make anymore is the nifty case, keyboard, and mouse.
Uhh, the motherboard? Sure, it has off-the-shelf chips on it (like all motherboards), but Apple definitely makes it, and it's a pretty important part of the computer.
And um, how much of the hardware did Apple make 10 years ago, that they no longer make themselves?
Except that if I want to learn how to use, say, iptables, OpenBSD documentation isn't going to help. If the same software works on both OpenBSD and Linux, chances are the documentation for it is identical anyway.
If you find Linux documentation that's misspelled (it can't be worse than what's typical for Slashdot), contact the maintainer and let them know.
When I'm looking for technical help, I usually try irc.freenode.net (formerly irc.openprojects.net). As long as you aren't obnoxious, people will generally help you.
Don't ask, "can I ask a question?" Don't assume that people are obligated to help you. Don't assume that people are deliberately ignoring you if you don't get an answer - it could mean that nobody there at the moment knows, so they're all just waiting for someone who does know to give an answer. If you know what you're doing and someone treats you like a newbie, don't take it personally - they don't know you.
Note that AOL and AIM are not at all the same service. Screen names share the same namespace, and there is some interoperability (improved dramatically over the last couple years from what I understand), but you can definitely run AIM while hating AOL.
Unless you hate the company, in which case you'd better also stay away from ICQ and WinAmp and Netscape and CNN and The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings movies and everything else they own.
I take it you've never met in a chatroom to discuss where to go out for drinks.
AIM used to have a limit of 160 buddies, but fortunately that restriction has been lifted. I just went through and cleaned out a few old screen names, so my list is down to 165 right now. Note that some people have multiple screen names (for example, one they use from home and one they use from work), so that's not 165 individual people, but probably closer to 100. Probably a little over half of them I've met in person; the rest I know only online.
On top of that, AIM is an invaluable tool for communicating in the workplace. I'm currently unemployed; if I were working I'd have a lot more people on my list. At the last couple of jobs I've had, people have distributed AIM buddy lists of employees, sorted by department and team. Not only can I talk to my coworkers while I'm on the phone with a customer (much faster than putting my customer on hold, walking over to them, waiting for them to put their customer on hold, asking a question, and walking back to my desk), but I can also chat with other employees who don't work at the same location. AIM is also used for sharing long URLs, since it's often easier to copy and paste than to read aloud and type, even when I'm on the phone with the other person, or they're just a few feet away.
And what do we do with spam from other countries? They are not bound by US law.
Encourage other countries to pass similar legislation.
Yes, that is the point. When your provider is shutdown by an avalanche of spam, it's your problem. When you pay inflated rates for service because of spam, that's your problem. When your service is impaired because of spam, that is your problem. Anything upstream of you is your problem.
I didn't say that's not also a problem. I meant that's not the point of this bill - regardless of what your essay says.
Is it "unsolicited commercial e-mail" or "unsolicited bulk e-mail"? If it's UCE, then sending unsolicited non-commercial e-mail to 25,000 people isn't spam. If it's UBE, then sending unsolicited commercial e-mail to 15 people may not be spam depending on your definition of "bulk". If 15 is bulk, what about 2? Can I send unsolicited mail to two people advertising a service I genuinely believe they'll be interested in?
Do I have to be the one advertising for it to count? Can I forward somebody else's advertisement for their product, if I think a few people might be interested in it, even though I would have nothing to gain from a sale?
I think you missed a word. The phrase you quoted was "stand 1st Amendment challenges", meaning, the new law should comply with the 1st Ammendment so that it would hold up in court as being constitutional if somebody tried to challenge it. It should be able to withstand challenges, not withstand the Constitution.
This Senate bill is crap, it's no good, it merely serves to legitimize spam.
That's the first step. Make a small amount of spam "legitimate" and the rest clearly and obviously illegal, then start suing those responsible for the illegal spam.
It's not good enough to be able to filter it more easily, it must be stopped at the source.
True, filtering spam doesn't help ISPs with bandwidth concerns, but it does help end users, and besides, that's not the point.
Bigger and better spam filters is like bigger and better water filters; wouldn't it be better to get clean water from the source?
That assumes you have a source of clean water. A couple of major metropolitan areas are investing in very expensive filtration systems because it's the only practical way to get clean water. Although, I did read something awhile back about San Diego considering hauling fresh water in giant balloons that would be towed along the Pacific coast from the mouth of a river further north.
A lot of spam that is sent through foreign relay servers originates here in the US, so that's still under US jurisdiction. Once most spam starts moving to other countries, the US can "exert pressure" on other governments to encourage them to pass similar legislation (send Colin Powell and crowbar for some closed-door negotiations, or whatever it is we do to get this sort of thing done). Failing that, a "spamming funds terrorism" campaign would probably go over pretty well.
One step at a time. Clean it up at home first, before worrying about the rest of the world.
No kidding. Somebody has to get money, since taking money away is probably the only thing spammers will pay attention to, but if the state attorneys general are the ones that will be doing the hard work, what right do I have to the proceeds? It should first cover their costs, and then be put to some other good use, like education.
...because it wouldn't outlaw spamming, rather it would outlaw one particular tactic used in spamming.
True, this will not eliminate spam. It will, however, reduce spam, in addition to making some spam easier to identify and filter.
Even though the bill doesn't say that it's perfectly acceptable to send junk e-mail with valid return addresses, spammers will still appeal to the wording as 'proof' that their postage-due garbage is 'free speech' and as such their ISPs shouldn't terminate them.
ISPs are private companies, and they have clearly posted terms of service. An ISP has the right to terminate the service of any customer they don't like, whether they're spamming or not. I've seen customers terminated just for pissing off a tech support rep. If an ISP terminates your service, it's because they don't want your business. They are not in any way obligated to provide service to you; they just want to make money.
Spam should be outlawed, period. We don't need laws that define 'legal' spam, all spam should be illegal because all spam is postage-due advertising.
OK, so what is spam, legally? Does it count as spam if it's sent unsolicited to 25,000 people but isn't actually advertising a product? Does it count as spam if it's only sent to 15 carefully selected people and it advertises a product related to their work? Does it count as spam if it was sent to a list of people who signed up for a mailing list, even if some of them reported it as spam anyway? What if they signed up for someone else's mailing list, and I bought the list from them?
Anything else will give spammers something to toss into their e-mails as a 'disclaimer' to 'prove' that their mailings aren't spam (notice many spams that STILL reference a bill that died in committee as though it had been passed into law, not only citing a bill that never made it into law but also completely misstating what the bill would have done).
Precisely why we need REAL legislation that makes it clearly illegal to do just that.
All spammers are thieves and liars. Don't give them any ammunition.
A few are honest morons. Do they deserve the same punishment as liars and thieves? Probably so, but decent legislation should also make education easier.
Remember, the law can always be ammended as needed. Baby steps first.
1) Drag your Applications folder to the Dock, and right-click (or control-click, or click-and-hold) to get the menu you're looking for.
2) This works just fine. Make sure "Always open folders in a new window" is checked in Finder Preferences, and hold down the Option key while double-clicking a folder if you don't want the previous window to stay open. But that's just my recommendation as a long-time Mac user - I think it should work without that checked.
3) Yeah, this kinda sucks. Each application usually has a way to switch between its windows, so for example you can Cmd-Tab to Mozilla then Cmd-1 between browser windows, but this varies between apps (most common are Cmd-~ or Cmd-left/right arrow keys or Cmd-numbers; Mozilla uses Cmd-number to switch between components and Cmd-1 alternates between browser windows).
4) All the shortcuts for menu items are plainly listed in the menus (although you may have to get used to the icons for Option and Shift keys). If you're looking for other things (like holding the Option key while opening a folder, as I mentioned above) Mac OS 9 had good help on this but OSX appears not to. Hopefully Panther will add better help (and a Help Viewer based on WebCore).
5) Try the View menu, which lists them all alphabetically.
6) The Mac has never had a maximize button; most people want to be able to work with several windows at once and see them on top of each other. The Zoom button is very nice for things like folder windows, since it will resize the window to fit the contents (this has been buggy in OSX, but getting better), but for other windows it may not be especially useful. Might be a hack somewhere...
7) And I want it to windowshade, which there is a shareware hack for. Hopefully Apple will address this in a future release.
8) Yes, the Terminal is slow. I'm not entirely sure why. It's even slower with transparency and antialiasing turned on. I haven't noticed bash to be slower than tcsh though; that seems pretty silly.
9) Hold Cmd-V for Verbose mode; it won't go faster but it'll give you something to look at.
10) Huh? You mean you want it to boot from CD by default? Fair enough, but sorry, it doesn't do that by default. You can select a CD in System Preferences/Startup Disk; I'm not sure if that sets it to boot from any CD by default or just that one. Hold the C key to boot from CD; in addition to being in the printed instructions that came with the computer, it's also usually printed on the CD itself.
11) I don't have a laptop so can't comment.
12) Wish I knew.
13) No idea what you're talking about; I've never needed to reinstall.
14) Because only advanced users from other platforms ask these questions?
15) No idea what you mean. Are you talking about broken aliases, or applications that don't work?
16) Originally because when you double-clicked a document, it would automatically "find" the application that created the document (no matter where it was), and launch that application. In 1984 this was very impressive. It's long overdue for a renaming.
17) Yes, but UNIX directories like etc and usr are hidden. When you open your main hard drive and you see folders called Applications, Library, System and Users, you're looking at the root directory with UNIX things hidden. You can either hack it to show them, or make symlinks to those directories (which won't be hidden), or press Cmd-Shift-G and type the path you want.
18) Software Update only updates Apple software; StuffIt Expander is made by Aladdin Systems and just happens to be bundled with the Mac OS. I wish Software Update were expanded to include third-party apps, and maybe someday it will be. I have no idea why it would crash; try asking Aladdin.
19) Huh? Desktop menu? Are you talking about icons on the Desktop? If so, uncheck them in Finder Preferences. If you're talking about the system-wide menu bar (as opposed to menu bars within windows), get used to it, it's
Slashdot Mirror
Or perhaps they received 46,000 complaints in a matter of days, and it took them that long to prepare their case? uce@ftc.gov doesn't receive a small amount of complaints.
:-)
But I didn't read the article either.
Agreed. Most people are learning that you should never click a "remove" link for that very reason, and the time is not yet right to start telling people that it's now OK to click the "remove" link.
;-)
The best thing to do right now is to start with the worst cases, and quickly prosecute them under existing laws for fraud etc., then make it illegal to spam without "ADV:" as the first four characters of the subject line (I think California did this?) or add a header to identify spam, make the new law well-known, and start aggressively prosecuting violators. That doesn't reduce ISP bandwidth, unfortunately*, but it makes filtering much easier, and the easier it is to filter, the fewer end-users will see it, and the less profitable it will become.
This is in addition to everything else people are doing to combat spam - I use bayesian filtering myself, among other things.
* I think it's RFC 822 that says once you've accepted the message envelope (just who the message is from and to, not the subject line), you have to accept the whole message. Once the message has been accepted and the bandwidth has been used, then you can discard it without delivering it to a mailbox if you want.
They'll likely compile a list of all the email addresses that were spammed to and make them available to spammers.
Oh yeah, if I were a spammer, the addresses I'd want to add to my list are people who previously complained about spam to the FTC. That'll be great for business!
(Oh, yeah, and if you make an alias, the Terminal/shell treats it as a symlink.)
No it doesn't - I just tried it, and it didn't work. This is exactly the sort of thing the parent is complaining about - yes, symlinks and aliases are different things, but although either one works in the Finder, only symlinks work from UNIX apps. UNIX apps, including tcsh and bash, do not recognize aliases and will not follow them.
I don't know if this is fixable on a system-wide basis, but I suspect it isn't. Each app would need to be updated to recognize aliases.
The only thing they make anymore is the nifty case, keyboard, and mouse.
Uhh, the motherboard? Sure, it has off-the-shelf chips on it (like all motherboards), but Apple definitely makes it, and it's a pretty important part of the computer.
And um, how much of the hardware did Apple make 10 years ago, that they no longer make themselves?
Did you forget John?
When I first read that, I thought 69/8 was a reference to my boss's sense of time.
My first thought was a musical meter: 69 8th-notes per measure.
Except that if I want to learn how to use, say, iptables, OpenBSD documentation isn't going to help. If the same software works on both OpenBSD and Linux, chances are the documentation for it is identical anyway.
If you find Linux documentation that's misspelled (it can't be worse than what's typical for Slashdot), contact the maintainer and let them know.
A good community isn't free? In what sense?
Pretend you're a girl.
She is a girl. Good advice, though!
When I'm looking for technical help, I usually try irc.freenode.net (formerly irc.openprojects.net). As long as you aren't obnoxious, people will generally help you.
Don't ask, "can I ask a question?" Don't assume that people are obligated to help you. Don't assume that people are deliberately ignoring you if you don't get an answer - it could mean that nobody there at the moment knows, so they're all just waiting for someone who does know to give an answer. If you know what you're doing and someone treats you like a newbie, don't take it personally - they don't know you.
YOU ALL ARE RUNNING AOL!
Note that AOL and AIM are not at all the same service. Screen names share the same namespace, and there is some interoperability (improved dramatically over the last couple years from what I understand), but you can definitely run AIM while hating AOL.
Unless you hate the company, in which case you'd better also stay away from ICQ and WinAmp and Netscape and CNN and The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings movies and everything else they own.
I take it you've never met in a chatroom to discuss where to go out for drinks.
AIM used to have a limit of 160 buddies, but fortunately that restriction has been lifted. I just went through and cleaned out a few old screen names, so my list is down to 165 right now. Note that some people have multiple screen names (for example, one they use from home and one they use from work), so that's not 165 individual people, but probably closer to 100. Probably a little over half of them I've met in person; the rest I know only online.
On top of that, AIM is an invaluable tool for communicating in the workplace. I'm currently unemployed; if I were working I'd have a lot more people on my list. At the last couple of jobs I've had, people have distributed AIM buddy lists of employees, sorted by department and team. Not only can I talk to my coworkers while I'm on the phone with a customer (much faster than putting my customer on hold, walking over to them, waiting for them to put their customer on hold, asking a question, and walking back to my desk), but I can also chat with other employees who don't work at the same location. AIM is also used for sharing long URLs, since it's often easier to copy and paste than to read aloud and type, even when I'm on the phone with the other person, or they're just a few feet away.
Tune in next week when the poster describes how to set up NIC Cards on your PC Computer using only OSS Software from the FSF Foundation.
Will I need to upgrade my RAM memory? I'll have to stop at an ATM machine on my way to Fry's...
And what do we do with spam from other countries? They are not bound by US law.
Encourage other countries to pass similar legislation.
Yes, that is the point. When your provider is shutdown by an avalanche of spam, it's your problem. When you pay inflated rates for service because of spam, that's your problem. When your service is impaired because of spam, that is your problem. Anything upstream of you is your problem.
I didn't say that's not also a problem. I meant that's not the point of this bill - regardless of what your essay says.
Is it "unsolicited commercial e-mail" or "unsolicited bulk e-mail"? If it's UCE, then sending unsolicited non-commercial e-mail to 25,000 people isn't spam. If it's UBE, then sending unsolicited commercial e-mail to 15 people may not be spam depending on your definition of "bulk". If 15 is bulk, what about 2? Can I send unsolicited mail to two people advertising a service I genuinely believe they'll be interested in?
Do I have to be the one advertising for it to count? Can I forward somebody else's advertisement for their product, if I think a few people might be interested in it, even though I would have nothing to gain from a sale?
I think you missed a word. The phrase you quoted was "stand 1st Amendment challenges", meaning, the new law should comply with the 1st Ammendment so that it would hold up in court as being constitutional if somebody tried to challenge it. It should be able to withstand challenges, not withstand the Constitution.
This Senate bill is crap, it's no good, it merely serves to legitimize spam.
That's the first step. Make a small amount of spam "legitimate" and the rest clearly and obviously illegal, then start suing those responsible for the illegal spam.
It's not good enough to be able to filter it more easily, it must be stopped at the source.
True, filtering spam doesn't help ISPs with bandwidth concerns, but it does help end users, and besides, that's not the point.
Bigger and better spam filters is like bigger and better water filters; wouldn't it be better to get clean water from the source?
That assumes you have a source of clean water. A couple of major metropolitan areas are investing in very expensive filtration systems because it's the only practical way to get clean water. Although, I did read something awhile back about San Diego considering hauling fresh water in giant balloons that would be towed along the Pacific coast from the mouth of a river further north.
A lot of spam that is sent through foreign relay servers originates here in the US, so that's still under US jurisdiction. Once most spam starts moving to other countries, the US can "exert pressure" on other governments to encourage them to pass similar legislation (send Colin Powell and crowbar for some closed-door negotiations, or whatever it is we do to get this sort of thing done). Failing that, a "spamming funds terrorism" campaign would probably go over pretty well.
One step at a time. Clean it up at home first, before worrying about the rest of the world.
No kidding. Somebody has to get money, since taking money away is probably the only thing spammers will pay attention to, but if the state attorneys general are the ones that will be doing the hard work, what right do I have to the proceeds? It should first cover their costs, and then be put to some other good use, like education.
They should not be allowed to have a say in any anti-spam legislation.
Of course they should - that's what democracy is all about. The United States is a democratic republic, not a dictatorship.
The EFF and other groups should also be allowed to have a say, and Congress should act in the best interest of the public. We'll see what happens.
...because it wouldn't outlaw spamming, rather it would outlaw one particular tactic used in spamming.
True, this will not eliminate spam. It will, however, reduce spam, in addition to making some spam easier to identify and filter.
Even though the bill doesn't say that it's perfectly acceptable to send junk e-mail with valid return addresses, spammers will still appeal to the wording as 'proof' that their postage-due garbage is 'free speech' and as such their ISPs shouldn't terminate them.
ISPs are private companies, and they have clearly posted terms of service. An ISP has the right to terminate the service of any customer they don't like, whether they're spamming or not. I've seen customers terminated just for pissing off a tech support rep. If an ISP terminates your service, it's because they don't want your business. They are not in any way obligated to provide service to you; they just want to make money.
Spam should be outlawed, period. We don't need laws that define 'legal' spam, all spam should be illegal because all spam is postage-due advertising.
OK, so what is spam, legally? Does it count as spam if it's sent unsolicited to 25,000 people but isn't actually advertising a product? Does it count as spam if it's only sent to 15 carefully selected people and it advertises a product related to their work? Does it count as spam if it was sent to a list of people who signed up for a mailing list, even if some of them reported it as spam anyway? What if they signed up for someone else's mailing list, and I bought the list from them?
Anything else will give spammers something to toss into their e-mails as a 'disclaimer' to 'prove' that their mailings aren't spam (notice many spams that STILL reference a bill that died in committee as though it had been passed into law, not only citing a bill that never made it into law but also completely misstating what the bill would have done).
Precisely why we need REAL legislation that makes it clearly illegal to do just that.
All spammers are thieves and liars. Don't give them any ammunition.
A few are honest morons. Do they deserve the same punishment as liars and thieves? Probably so, but decent legislation should also make education easier.
Remember, the law can always be ammended as needed. Baby steps first.
I think it's time to run some more hot water in my bath.
Hope you remembered your towel. You should never be without one, you know.
That modern oasis of nerdlyness with a mythical amount of bandwidth?
It was a myth.
1) Drag your Applications folder to the Dock, and right-click (or control-click, or click-and-hold) to get the menu you're looking for.
2) This works just fine. Make sure "Always open folders in a new window" is checked in Finder Preferences, and hold down the Option key while double-clicking a folder if you don't want the previous window to stay open. But that's just my recommendation as a long-time Mac user - I think it should work without that checked.
3) Yeah, this kinda sucks. Each application usually has a way to switch between its windows, so for example you can Cmd-Tab to Mozilla then Cmd-1 between browser windows, but this varies between apps (most common are Cmd-~ or Cmd-left/right arrow keys or Cmd-numbers; Mozilla uses Cmd-number to switch between components and Cmd-1 alternates between browser windows).
4) All the shortcuts for menu items are plainly listed in the menus (although you may have to get used to the icons for Option and Shift keys). If you're looking for other things (like holding the Option key while opening a folder, as I mentioned above) Mac OS 9 had good help on this but OSX appears not to. Hopefully Panther will add better help (and a Help Viewer based on WebCore).
5) Try the View menu, which lists them all alphabetically.
6) The Mac has never had a maximize button; most people want to be able to work with several windows at once and see them on top of each other. The Zoom button is very nice for things like folder windows, since it will resize the window to fit the contents (this has been buggy in OSX, but getting better), but for other windows it may not be especially useful. Might be a hack somewhere...
7) And I want it to windowshade, which there is a shareware hack for. Hopefully Apple will address this in a future release.
8) Yes, the Terminal is slow. I'm not entirely sure why. It's even slower with transparency and antialiasing turned on. I haven't noticed bash to be slower than tcsh though; that seems pretty silly.
9) Hold Cmd-V for Verbose mode; it won't go faster but it'll give you something to look at.
10) Huh? You mean you want it to boot from CD by default? Fair enough, but sorry, it doesn't do that by default. You can select a CD in System Preferences/Startup Disk; I'm not sure if that sets it to boot from any CD by default or just that one. Hold the C key to boot from CD; in addition to being in the printed instructions that came with the computer, it's also usually printed on the CD itself.
11) I don't have a laptop so can't comment.
12) Wish I knew.
13) No idea what you're talking about; I've never needed to reinstall.
14) Because only advanced users from other platforms ask these questions?
15) No idea what you mean. Are you talking about broken aliases, or applications that don't work?
16) Originally because when you double-clicked a document, it would automatically "find" the application that created the document (no matter where it was), and launch that application. In 1984 this was very impressive. It's long overdue for a renaming.
17) Yes, but UNIX directories like etc and usr are hidden. When you open your main hard drive and you see folders called Applications, Library, System and Users, you're looking at the root directory with UNIX things hidden. You can either hack it to show them, or make symlinks to those directories (which won't be hidden), or press Cmd-Shift-G and type the path you want.
18) Software Update only updates Apple software; StuffIt Expander is made by Aladdin Systems and just happens to be bundled with the Mac OS. I wish Software Update were expanded to include third-party apps, and maybe someday it will be. I have no idea why it would crash; try asking Aladdin.
19) Huh? Desktop menu? Are you talking about icons on the Desktop? If so, uncheck them in Finder Preferences. If you're talking about the system-wide menu bar (as opposed to menu bars within windows), get used to it, it's
I stand corrected.